One big, round number has increasingly shaped the thinking and decisions of the capital's planners and politicians during 2013. That number is 10 million, which is estimated to be the population of Greater London by 2031 or so - a surge from the current 8.3 million bringing with it pressing demands for more jobs, homes, transport capacity, schools and health and other services, yet which might also be seen as a sign of London's resilient economic vigour. Declining cities, after all, aren't noted for population booms.

But submerged within that big, round number are many other equally striking demographic stats, each telling a salient story - or part of one, at least - about the way the capital's population is changing not only in its size but also in its composition, distribution and quality of life. These stories matter because they reveal important patterns of preference, need and aspiration, some of them new, some of them old and all of them relevant to meeting the challenges that rapid journey towards 10 million presents.

One vital thread to grasp, re-confirmed this year, is that the boom is mostly driven by what the number crunchers call "natural change" which means the number of births minus the number of deaths. The latest Office for National Statistics figures have shown that in the year to June 2012 the number of people who moved out of London (360,000) and the number who moved in (370,000) were almost the same. But during that period "natural change" is estimated to have generated around 90,000 additional Londoners, with 134,000 babies being born. Newborns are the capital's principal drivers of population growth.

So what about migration? Back in October much of the media became gripped by a narrative asserting that London's middle-classes are being driven from the city by massive hikes in property prices caused by super-rich foreign investors. Yet analysts question how large the effect of this has been beyond the prime sites of the centre and and should be borne in mind that people have been moving out of London in greater numbers than they've been moving in for a very long time - often eagerly, in search of better lives. I discovered recently, thanks to Professor Eric Kaufmann, that the outflow of Londoners to other parts of the UK has been greater than the reverse since the 1860s.

Kaufmann and colleagues have provided valuable insights during this year into patterns of population movement both in and out of Greater London and within it. Their findings have emerged in the course of exploring why, as the most recent census revealed, the number of white British people in London fell by 620,000 between 2001 and 2011. For some, this phenomenon is explained by - to reluctantly use the pernicious American term - "white flight" from the capital's increasing ethnic diversity. For others it is simply part of a much broader process of upwardly mobile movement to the suburbs and beyond, as expounded by the Economist.

The measured conclusion of Kaufmann is that there is reason to doubt the hypothesis that white Londoners have been fleeing from diversity, although he doesn't think the "counterurbanisation" thesis explains everything either. His project also produced some fascinating tracking of how the locations and concentrations of other ethnic groups inside Greater London have variously evolved over recent decades.

Spend some time with the electoral ward charts assembled here and learn, for example, that concentrations of people of Pakistani origin or descent have shifted since the early 1990s from three main locations to three different ones. They've moved outwards from clusters in, roughly speaking, Waltham Forest and Newham, Hounslow, Ealing and Brent, and Wandsworth and Merton, dispersing to Hillingdon in the far west, Redbridge, Barking and Dagenham and Havering in the outer east and the southern towns and suburbs of Croydon, Sutton and Kingston. Meanwhile, even as larger numbers of white Britons have left London a smaller but still significant number, typically in their twenties, have moved into city's diverse neighbourhoods from elsewhere. I plan to delve deeper into this rich body of research next year.

Other fruitful data interrogations published this year shed light on the extent and distribution of economic hardship in London. Professor Ruth Lupton and others have shown not only that between 2007/08 and 2010 the incomes of the poorest 10% of Londoners fell alarmingly but also that the incidence of poverty was becoming spread more evenly across the boroughs. Poverty rates in Inner London had fallen, although this didn't mean that the numbers of poor people in inner London had reduced. The rates in Outer London, meanwhile, had risen, for which there could be several reasons yet to be unearthed. The impact of the coalition's benefit cuts and caps is expected to accentuate these changes in the geography of poverty. London's latest Poverty Profile came to similar conclusions.

These assorted, overlapping trends in population drift, change and churn might lend themselves to differing, sometimes competing, interpretations within the context of an overall population boom. How far and in what ways do they reflect well on London as an urban society and to what extent do they indict it? A big question and one I've a feeling will keep me occupied for a tidy slice of 2014.